A arte desse jogo é bacana, mas o resto é bem fraco.
O jogo não sabe o que quer ser, horas vejo ele como um metroidvania, horas vejo como um "roguelike" (não sei bem o que tentaram fazer), mas no fim fica meio confuso, a única diferença que te faz progredir no jogo é a habilidade de abrir umas "portas" estranhas e só. Trilha sonora, combate, historia, tudo é meio simples demais, fora que a dificuldade do jogo é baixíssima com uns bosses muito meia boca. Um ponto que vale elogiar são as bruxarias que a nossa personagem solta, que são bem feitas e tem um impacto significante no combate.
Enfim, se você está a fim de jogar um metroidvania, tente escolher outro título.

Moonscars often comes tantalisingly close to being a really competent game but then, just as quickly, will make some really clumsy mistakes that could’ve been easily avoided with more care and effort. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes even quite good, the potential is here, but the execution is sadly lacking.

5 / 10
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Man, I just don’t seem to have any luck with Metroidvanias as of late. Over the course of the last two years I must’ve played well over 10 of them, and I’m sad to say that the vast majority of them really aren’t anything to write home about. It’s gotten so common I’ve come to use the term “Midroidvania” to refer to the majority of them. And with that I don’t mean to simply shit on the (mostly independent) developers working in that genre; but rather I want to acknowledge that making one of these is HARD. There are so many individual elements you need to get just right. A good MV has to have a great world to explore, good combat and platforming mechanics, a good art style and good music to begin with. If even one of those core aspects doesn't fully connect with a player it can destroy the entire experience before it even fully started.

The best one I played last year was probably Ender Lilies (which I’ve spoken about in a review here), and that one was admittedly mostly pretty good, albeit with some definite room for improvement. The rest of them, while not terrible, were either too linear and short, or would try and force in some really unfitting game mechanics that did not complement the MV structure what so ever. Others yet were MVs only insofar you unlock abilities that let you bypass obstacles which you couldn’t before, while barely engaging with what are in my opinion the most interesting aspects of the genre; exploration, backtracking and environmental story telling. The last Metroidvania I played I would call a genuinely fantastic game front to back is Blasphemous; and it’s precisely the game that Moonscars seems to take heavy inspiration from.

Moonscars, like Blasphemous, is a Metroidvania set in a dark, (presumably) post-apocalyptic, medieval European inspired world filled with castles, caves, ghouls, ghosts and goblins, populated by weirdos who speak in riddles and with imagery drawing heavily from Christian iconography. It’s thick with atmosphere and asks the player to really take in the environments, and to wallow in the melancholy that the world presents.

But where Blasphemous is a game which masterfully weaves together an imaginative, rich world full of incredibly dense and cryptic lore, with great, fluid combat, great exploration and some of the best art and music in gaming period, Moonscars, in an attempt to more-or-less copy this entire formula wholesale, never really gets to define itself as its own unique experience, and also fumbles some of these aspects to the detriment of the whole game. The developers here were so busy creating an experience similar to Blasphemous, it feels like their inspiration became their literal blueprint, and this will become apparent the more we get into the nitty gritty.

Before I get more into the negative aspects of Moonscars, I want to highlight a few things I enjoyed about it first, and why - despite criticising this game quite harshly at times - I would still consider this an overall decent experience that’s at least worth a try if you’re a fan of the genre.

Let’s start with the fact that Black Mermaid (the dev studio) is a very small, newly established team from Moldova with no prior experience in making games, meaning that this is their first game they ever made. And considering that, it’s a very impressive feat that the game came out as solid as it did. I really want to again hammer home the point that I do NOT intend to shit on a small Eastern European studio with a number of employees smaller than that of a regular dentist’s office. Instead I want to offer constructive criticism where it makes sense.

Perhaps the strongest aspect of this game would have to be the combat. Here, it’s definitely the closest to actually feeling like a really solid game, making it feel like this is where most of the time and effort went. The animations on Grey Irma (the player character) look fluid and deliberate, and at times come very close to Blasphemous, with the difference that Moonscars actually manages to give the attacks and movements even stronger feeling of weight and impact. There is more inertia involved, which feels different from Blasphemous’ more “arcady” movement. The combat can be best described as “2D Souls-lite”, meaning you have your typical high-commitment attack animations which can’t be cancelled, an I-frame dodge, a parry, a magic/mana bar which lets you use spells, having to retrieve your XP on death aka “corpse running”, etc. You get the idea. In general it feels very close to Blasphemous, but I will utter my hottest take in the entire review right now; I think that Moonscars’ combat has the potential to be even more fun than Blasphemous. At least, I found myself slip into “the zone” a lot more often with Moonscars, than it did with the other one. You have more movement options, you’re faster, you have more attacks and you also die quicker. You have a Hollow Knight-esque heal that replenishes whenever you deal or receive damage, but you can use it a LOT faster and more efficiently than in that game. At first I thought that this was stupidly overpowered, with you being able to instantly heal basically whenever you want, but you can still be attacked and, like in Hollow Knight, you heal from the same mana pool that you use your spells with, which are going to become your main source of damage over time. There are also the so called “special weapons” (more like special attacks) you’ll occasionally find by beating certain enemies of completing certain tasks, but I’m afraid I’ll have to save talking about them until we get to the “bad” portion of the game, since this aspect is sadly the biggest flaw with Moonscars’ combat. Finally, the enemy design is really cool for the most part, and their variety is, overall, sufficient. It’s not fantastic, and there were times (especially towards the end) where I felt like I saw the same few enemy types over and over again but with slightly different attack animations, but it definitely gets the job done much more than other games in the Metroidvania genre. The same can be said for boss fights. They’re solid, some are even pretty good. I’d say their biggest problem is that they all feel somewhat similar, like, they’re all testing very similar skills, just in different permutations. But yeah, overall this is where the game is strongest.

Let’s talk about the level and world design. Both aspects are done rather well for the most part, and certainly better than other’s in the genre I’ve played, but already there’s a lot of room for improvement here. More on that later though. As for the good bits, the levels are all very pretty. The artists took meticulous care in illustrating the backgrounds and all the individual elements. The lighting is quite beautiful for the most part and I think the levels all do a very good job of leading you through them without making you go down a specific path. Sometimes they do get a little too linear for my taste but it’s fine. Short cuts are frequent and see more usage than checkpoints, which are surprisingly few and far between across the whole world, which in my opinion is a good thing. Using shortcuts over checkpoints is always a great way of cultivating an actual understanding of the map in the player, since it reduces the necessity for fast travel.

The music is also very nice, even if it’s a little understated at times. It’s melancholic, sad and bleak, but never without a glimmer of hope in there, somewhere, reminiscent of FromSoftware’s Souls games. The biggest compliment I can give it is that it always felt fitting to the environments, and that sometimes it’s really serene and beautiful, even if it feels like it’s kinda everything to draw attention away from itself.

A thing I found particularly impressive was the fact that the entire game works without a single loading screen, instead seamlessly transitioning between stages. It really seems to be one, massive, contiguous map, making it feel very similar to the original Dark Souls in that regard. You can go from the very first frame of the game all the way to the credits without ever leaving the actual gameplay - safe for some very scarce cutscenes. This makes for really great traversal, never taking you out of the action, no matter where you go. I always love when games are able to do this, it makes the whole act of going through a place so much more authentic.

All that said, I’m afraid this is where I’m kinda running out of things to praise. Do not get me wrong, so far this is all incredibly impressive and ambitious for such a small team with so little experience. If nothing else this really highlights their potential and makes me very interested in whatever they’re doing in the future. But now we have to get into what they need to work on and do differently the next time.

Without further ado, let’s get right into my least favourite aspect of Moonscars: it’s story - or rather, its presentation thereof. You know what, scratch that, just the writing in general.

In the broadest possible sense I would describe this game’s style of writing as: Death Stranding / Metal Gear meets Dark Souls / Blasphemous. Meaning, you’ll get absolutely drowned in expositional dialogue (more often monologues), characters will never stop talking at you but they only speak in the most arcane way possible, which means none of it will make any sense to you at all. You get buried in utterly meaningless world salads. This is bad enough when it comes to story moments or boss monologues or whatever, but in Moonscars, literally none of the characters EVER stop talking. I am seriously not exaggerating when I say that this game has perhaps the biggest ratio of unnecessary dialogue to gameplay I have ever seen. They NEVER stop talking. It’s mental. One of the most egregious examples of this comes in the form of the “memory mould” interactions. These things basically work like the consumable Soul-items from Dark Souls, which give you XP when used. Usually with these games, you just gulp them down and that’s it. But in this game, instead, you have to go to an NPC who will greet you with 3 entire boxes of dialogue each time, then you’ll have to give her one (for a pitiful amount of XP no less) but you only get it if you listen to TWENTY fucking boxes of dialogue - PER MEMORY MOULD. This is absurd to the point of parody. Was there truly no one in the development team who realised how utterly fucking grating this would be?

Given the way I just went off about the writing in this game you might not believe me, but I don’t even mind having to listen to a lot of dialogue if it’s any interesting. I love the Metal Gear series, and I particularly love the fact that they talk so much, because if it’s not actually interesting it’s at least funny or zany. Here, everything is just boring and nondescript. It’s as if the devs were deathly afraid to break out of the mould (pardon the pun) that Dark Souls set for the genre.

It’s quite sad that Moonscars is so afraid of actually just saying what it wants to say. Because despite the game’s best efforts of making itself as incomprehensible as humanly possible, I was able to pick up on something resembling themes here. Of course you have the setting, which frames the story as the experience of a clay statue, mixed with a surprising amount of dialogue that explicitly discusses Grey Irma’s identity as a woman. In fact, there seems to be a lot of imagery and symbolism relating to womanhood, menstruation and childbirth/raising children. It’s almost as though underneath all the rubble of forcibly abstruse walls of text, there might be something of an interesting story developing. It’s very unfortunate then, that this game chose this particular style of plot structure, because now I will never bother to find out anything, simply because the act of engaging with this story feels almost punishing.

Sadly we’re not quite done yet, as another problem that compounds with this comes in the form of really questionable translation. It’s been a bit too long since I’ve beaten it to accurately remember the exact wording of some of the badly translated lines, but I can recall at least a few phrases. For example, at one point King Drahan is referred to as “the only legit ruler of the land”, when they clearly meant to say “the legitimate king”. In general, people in the game would often use wildly inauthentic language, like using modern slang like “for real”, or “that’s cool” or similar things like that; and if this felt at all intentional I wouldn’t even point this out. But it’s fairly obvious that they tried to go for your typical pseudo-medieval Ye Olde English in the same style of Dark Souls and Blasphemous, but whoever was in charge of the translation into English sadly doesn’t seem to be fluent enough to competently write in that style. I did also very briefly check out the German translation (I speak German natively) just out of sheer curiosity, and unsurprisingly this translation is much worse. Spelling errors, grammatical errors and even some core elements of the story get translated extremely weirdly. Like, “Ichor” is translated to “Sekret”, which means “secretion” and has nothing to do with Ichor, the Blood of the Gods - in fact, it doesn’t really have a German translation as such. It’s usually just called “Blut der Götter / Götterblut”.

So this has been by far the game’s biggest flaw as I’m concerned, but sadly there is more we need to talk about.

Let’s continue with the fact that Moonscars is, at its core, extremely linear with no real instances of optional side paths, secret areas, secret bosses or anything at all really. The most you’re getting is getting to explore the individual levels relatively freely, although even here you’re led by the nose for most of it. What’s stranger is that you don’t don’t even really have to go back to previous areas at all if you don’t want to. In fact, the devs just don’t seem all that interested in making you actually explore the world they created. The only instance where you’re given the option to go back and explore is to gather a whole bunch of lost earrings. And it’s honestly pretty boring. Finding these is necessary to complete a side quest, but they only spawn in Ravenous Moon mode.

I haven’t talked about it yet because it didn’t really fit into the rest of the text yet, but to briefly explain it: The Moon Phase mechanic is a bit like Demon’s Souls “World Tendency” and is almost certainly inspired by it.

[For those that don’t know what that is: In Demon’s Souls, you have 2 forms. Human and Soul. If you die in human form at any point in a level, your so called “World Tendency” goes down one step towards Black, aka “Black World Tendency”, for that level. If you kill a boss, a Red Phantom or help another player do the same your tendency will instead shift to “White”. This works in a 7-tier system, where it goes from -3 to +3. -3 represents “Pure Black”, +3 represents “Pure White”. In Pure Black, enemies will deal increased damage, have increased health, will spawn in higher numbers but will also drop more souls and better items. In Pure White, the opposite is true. There are also specific events that will ONLY happen during either Pure Black or Pure White tendency.]

Basically, Moonscars tries to implement a similar system, with Ravenous Moon mode being the equivalent of Pure Black World Tendency. If you die a certain amount of times, the moon will become red and enemies will deal increased damage and have increased health, but will also drop more XP. You can also just switch it on or off at the Checkpoint with a consumable - at least at first. In Demon’s Souls, this would add new stuff to levels you’ve already been through, maybe include some otherwise unobtainable weapons or spells, etc. Here, it’s really just to increase enemy strength and so you can find those ear rings. It feels woefully half-baked, and like they just implemented it without thinking about how this would translate into an actual gameplay mechanic.

That tangent out of the way, let’s get back to the world design. This world consists of only 5 areas. The tutorial area village, the obligatory castle level, 2 (technically 3) separate underground sections and the top of the castle. In terms of variety in level structure, to say that this is the barest of minimums is to be euphemistic. It makes the world feel incredibly tiny. It would be one thing if the story of this game truly revolved specifically around the castle, but instead it’s about the fate of the whole kingdom and life and the universe and god and everything. And as such it just feels weird that the entirety of this game’s world-defining plot takes place entirely within the castle. As a matter of fact, only 4 out of the 5 areas in the game see actual continued usage. Once you’ve cleared the tutorial, you literally never have to go back there, not even to collect ear rings. I know this seems like a weird complaint, but to me having to go back to the tutorial area later in the game is a staple of the genre. It connects the beginning of the story to its end, and it recontextualises your journey, shows how far you’ve come. I 100% expected to emerge out of some underground passage and end up in the village at some point in the game, but that moment never came.

The lack of more individual areas would be excusable if the already existing ones would try and stand apart even the tiniest bit, but sadly they all follow the same design philosophy from start to finish, but game design wise as well as aesthetically. All areas sadly feel overly similar in terms of vibe and structure. Sure, the castle level is a bit more vertically inclined than the lower areas, and you have some very, VERY subtle colour palette swaps between levels, but the vast majority of the aesthetic design of the areas boils down to a lot of grey, black, white and red. At first this is cool and gives the game a strong sense of style, even if it’s a little cliché. But after the first couple of hours, you realise that the entire game looks like this, and it begins to get stale very quickly. Every area effectively feels the same. And, while I did compliment the game for this earlier, the more you play this game the more apparent it becomes just what a massive influence Blasphemous was on any level, especially in terms of art direction. It often crosses the line from “inspired by” to “derivative of”.

But for the strangest thing about this game is that it almost seems like it doesn’t even really want to be a Metroidvania game at all. As strange as it sounds, it almost feels like the initial idea for Moonscars was going to be just a linear 2D action platformer, maybe like the older Castlevania games, and then they tried to tape a Metroidvania system onto it. What do I mean by that?

Let’s start with the fact that, unlike practically any other MV out there, you get only a single ability in the whole game that (very slightly) changes your core moveset and allows you to access previously unreachable areas, and comes in the form of a long dash. This dash is utterly useless outside of the very specific interactions it was designed for, and would be the most disappointing thing about this game, if the other “””abilities””” you got weren’t even lamer. They’re not even abilities, they’re glorified keys. One lets you bypass some weird roots that simply open up when you approach them, and the other’s a literal key. That’s it. No double jump, no hook shot, no phasing through walls, etc. Nothing else changes about your core move set, and you never get to explore places you couldn’t reach before. Again, it’s as if the devs of this game were actively trying to make a Metroidvania game with implementing as few of the typical genre elements as possible. While that could potentially make for an interesting project, the way they handled it here, this game just feels unfinished. Like it’s gesturing towards an idea of a fully formed game, but was never finished.

Another thing I need to briefly address is Moonscars’ so called “special weapon” system. Except they’re more like “special attacks”. And they’re horrible. Seriously, they might be the worst thing about this game. I’m not exaggerating here, literally every single one of these is bad at best, and life-threateningly terrible at worst. Trying to actually use these is a surefire way to die in this game. They’re all infuriatingly slow - one special attack takes as long as about 5 normal attacks and does about half the damage - and they have no hyper armour either. They’re just straight up death traps and I cannot believe they exist in a finished game. There is only a single one that I found at least somewhat practical, and that’s the Harpoon, which is the only ranged option out of these. And believe me, I tried all of them, mostly out of sheer disbelief that they would ALL be this terrible. It’s abundantly clear that these things did not receive enough play testing before release.

And that kinda leads right into the next point; the fact that Black Mermaid’s QA department was either asleep at the wheel or simply nonexistent entirely. This game clearly did not receive a whole lot of play-testing before it got released. There are so, so many little glitches and bugs all over it. There are so many little things that would be impossible to keep in had they been noticed by a competent team of play testers. It begins with the controls feeling extremely unreliable in platforming sections, where platforms moving sideways will actually propel you forward if you land on them with too much speed. Or sometimes, they’ll simply slip away from underneath your feet as if inertia wasn’t a thing in this universe. Sometimes you briefly get stuck on level geometry on the floor and then get yeeted 50 meters to the right because the game stored that momentum. Sometimes you can just slide through wall-spikes and completely cheese the fuck out of a platforming sections. Or one of my favourites: Sometimes when I killed enemies, they would simply freeze in the air and stay there, like a statue with floating limbs, until I reloaded the area. But it’s not just related to bugs, it’s also the aforementioned special attacks, the platforming, the walls of text, the overly linear structure, etc. It’s very obvious that this game did not receive the care and attention it would’ve deserved before release. At least 50% of its problems could’ve been avoided with 10 dedicated play-testers playing through the game a couple of times, or hell, even just a couple of staff members. Honestly some of these oversights are so obvious and apparent that this is the only acceptable explanation for me. They simply never checked for this.

Ultimately, this sadly is a very mediocre game on all fronts. It has barely any original ideas here outside of its narrative - which as we discussed is barely even comprehensible. It’s very short and its world feels rather diminutive. It took me less than 10 hours to beat this, and that’s even though I did all side content I found. This needn’t be a problem in principle, but Moonscars does feel like it’s trying to trick you into thinking that it’s bigger than it actually is. It’s combat is solid but even here there are severe shortcomings. The bosses are neat but are about the only thing I can’t find some critical flaw with.

This review ended up a lot more negative than I originally intended, because I was going into this with the idea of primarily pointing out the good things about it. But the more I thought about it and the more distance I had to it, the more I realised that this simply is not a very good game, and I’m not sure if I would recommend it to fans of Metroidvanias. I’ve definitely played worse games than this, even within the genre, but only a few. Meanwhile, just about every other MV I’ve played is a more competently put together game than this, even the ones I really didn’t like that much, like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night or The Messenger. Despite me not really looking to play those again either, I would much quicker recommend these to you if you’re looking for a new experience.

I’m not saying that there’s nothing to get out of this game; if you somehow manage to crack the code and actually understand what the fuck this game’s story is actually about, you might even enjoy it. You might really enjoy the combat as long as you never touch the special attacks. Maybe you’ll simply get something out of its minimalistic art style. Personally, I think I won’t play this game again any time soon, but I will keep my eyes peeled for whenever Black Mermaid should come up with a new game. Because what Moonscars does show is potential. The potential to mould a fantastic game out of the shards of a mediocre one.

I hope I didn’t come across as an asshole in this review, and I once again want to make clear that I 100% support small indie studios like Black Mermaid and want to see them succeed. But I also have to be honest when I see a game that simply doesn’t work, and I want to help as best as I can by providing constructive but honest criticism where it fits.

Good luck for your next game BM, I’m sure it’ll turn out better!

I was scrolling through the playstation plus extra section of the store looking for something to play for just a few days before starting the massive Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth. I didn't have enough time to really dive in or replay anything substantially longer nor did i wanna spend money on something that I only wanted to play for a few days. I saw a quick minute video on the store front from moonscars that I've never heard of but looked like a gothic metroidvania and in combination of looking at the average completion time on how long to beat fit my criteria pretty well. A nearly complete blind buy.

For what i was looking for Moonscars did fit that bill but in all honesty is a pretty terrible game. Right from the get go the story is presented in a equal part minamalistic and nonsensical way. Trying to follow it was quite annoying, as it all text info dumps and boring. Nothing in the world or the game characters or backgrounds help pain a picture of what you are doing or whats going on. It always feels like it's trying to be a complex story but very little actually happens to keep the player motivated or curious as to what happens next. At about the half way point I just started skipping the text boxes, which is something I very rarely do, even when I'm not enjoying the story. The visuals at first felt unique and gothic but you will soon come to realize that this is the only style and color pallete the game is going to show. It is unlike say Hallow Knight where yes the game is comprised on dark and moody colors but has sprinkles of life and color all around it. Moonscars starts to feel like staring into a magic eye poster where everything is just bleeding gray and the only visual interesting thing that really stands out is your character and all you really see of that is the same three or so different animations that the character does.

As for the gameplay Moonscars is your standard metroidvania. Acutally saying standard is a disservice because while it doesn't do anything flat out terrible in it's traversal or combat it is quite below average in excution on all levels. Moonscars is functional and things attack you and there is pushback from the enemies but it is never satisfying. You really never deviate from basic strategies for destroying enemies. You have your basic strike combo and your prefered spell you spam when your meter is built up. There is one special attack that you can also use that you can periodically switch out that has better attack animation that usually buffs your character slightly but the long animation windows usually cause you to get damaged far more than you give out so it's rarely ever worth while. You simply do more damage through sword strikes and spells. Spells and health regeneration are tied to the same meter so you would think it would be a balancing act of a risk and reward but it's not. It's the same meter but tied individually to each action. Attacking enemies builds the meter and you can heal and use spells unlimitedly at almost all times. Who cares about trying to attack bosses defensively or reactively when you can just run up and spam attacks and heal at the same time. It's nice not having to rely on items to heal but this system just doesn't work well.

All of the rogue like elements this game has also are lazily designed or make such a minor difference they are not worth seeking out. Like souls games when you die you leave behind your spoils and they can be recollected on the next life. Pretty standard stuff in the genre in this day. The things you can buy with said spoils are so bland and situational they are not worth experimenting with. Plus a lot of said items you can buy can not be combined with other like items. Pushing back enemies slightly further from attacks, slight damage increase on next attack after a kill, increased defense but slow walk speed and so on. Boring. On top of that have you ever played a metroidvania where while exploring the world there is only ONE movement upgrade or skill that allows you to reach new areas? No double jump unlock to reach new heights, or transformation ability to get into a previously unacessible room or an item that allows you to climb to a place you couldn't reach before or boots that allow you to walk on spikes/poisen. Nothing like that. Just a single dash mechanic that use a couple of times. The whole game is just walking to one section of the map, finding a key and walk to another section. This game made me appreicate even the most basic of other metroidvania's. By the time I got to the end I was just begging for it to be over. I can only slay the same three or four basic fodder enemies over and over again. Don't waste your time on Moonscars.